Japanese man shows us the best thing to catch while playing Pokémon GO: Your lost cat

Long after the cat went missing, it was found while its 69-year-old owner was looking for digital wildlife.

Shinji Kajio has a lot to be happy about. He’s been a successful science fiction author since the early 1980s, and during the course of career his works have served as the basis for both a live-action movie (2002’s Yomigaeri) and manga (2008’s Omoide Emanon).

But that doesn’t mean nothing bad ever happens to Kajio. On February 28, his beloved pet cat, Kinako, went missing. He noticed his pet’s absence after a repairman who’d been at his house left, and when Kinako didn’t turn up after a search of the immediate area, Kajio began to fear that the cat had been poking around the repairman’s truck and was still aboard when he drove away.

The 69-year-old writer and resident of Kumamoto City, who maintains an active Twitter account, put up posters of his missing cat in the neighborhood, and also asked his online acquaintances to help spread the word as well. But as day after day passed with no sign of Kinako, Kajio began to worry that his pet would never be able to find its way home.

On the morning of March 13, Kajio woke up early. Unable to sleep any longer, he decided to go to Hanaokayama, a 132-meter (433-foot) mountain not far from the city center, to see what kind of Pokémon he could catch in Pokémon GO. Kajio hasn’t said if he was able to add any rare specimens to his Pokédex, but what he did find was Kinako!

As he approached the summit of Hanaokayama, Kajio was startled to come across his lost pet. “Kinako,” he called out, and the cat trotted over to him, bringing their harrowing two-week separation to a close, and owner and pet returned home together. “I’m not sure where she’s been or what she’s been doing, but she’s had an incredible appetite,” Kajio later tweeted, putting an even happier period on this Pokémon GO story than if it had ended with him catching a Party Pikachu.